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THE ART OF

JAMES BRANCH CABELL

By

Hugh Walpole

With an Appendix of Individual
Comment upon the Cabell Books

NEW YORK

ROBERT M. McBRIDE G? CO.

1920

BOOKS BY MR. CABELL

r

B£YX)ND Life

Figures of Earth (In Preparation)
DoMN^ (Revision of The Soul of Melicent)
Chivalry (Revised Version in Preparation)

JuRGEN (Suppressed)

The Line of Love (Revised Version in Preparation)

Gallantry (Revised Version in Preparation)

The Certain Hour

The Cords of Vanity (Revised)

From the Hidden Way

The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck

The Eagle's Shadow (New Version in Preparation)

The Cream of the Jest

Copyright 1920, The Yalo Ravlew!,

THE ART OF

JAMES BRANCH CABELL

By Hugh JValpole

THE English novel has reached in this year of grace, 1920,
one of the most interesting crises of its eventful history.
In a sense there is no crisis — that is, no more of a
crisis than there was in 1832, the year of Walter Scott's death ;
in 1861, the year of the publication of "Richard Feverel"; in
1890, the year of the first appearance of "The Yellow Book."
In a sense there never has been a crisis, because in spite of
certain obstinate and precipitantly determined mourners the
English novel will never die — so long as the English tongue is
spoken and men and women are willing to catch a moment's
pause from their business and listen to a story-teller.

But, if there are not crises, there are at any rate moments,
such as I have named, when the novel seems to begin a new
chapter in its history. Such a chapter I believe the year 1920
and its immediate successors are now writing.

In England the case is fairly plain. The war has quite
definitely marked off the novelists who began to fascinate us
some time before 1895 as of an older generation. That does
not mean that they no longer interest us — far from it — ^but
Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, George Moore, Rudyard
Kipling, and, in some degree, H. G. Wells and Arnold Ben-
nett, are now definitely accepted figures. We know what
they can do. "The figure in the carpet" is, in each case,
finally marked out for us. They have staked their claim for,
at any rate, some fragments of immortality.

These men were followed in England by a group of writers
who suffered the misfortune of definition when they were
still in their literary cradles. Somewhere about 1912 Henry
James critically delivered himself in the "Times Literary

THE ART OF JAMES BRANCH CABELL

Supplement" concerning the younger generation of English
novelists. After discussing the work of such seniors as
Joseph Conrad, Arnold Bennett, and H. ,G. Wells, he grouped
together comparative children like Compton Mackenzie,
D. H. Lawrence, and Gilbert Cannan. This started a fashion.
These unhappy ones, with certain reluctant additions, were,
before they had escaped from their literary teens, christened
the New Realists, or the Younger Novelists or the Neo-
Romanticists. Until the war buried their youth in a common
grave they were estimated with a critical seriousness that both
their immaturity and their own hesitation should have for-
bidden. The war has at least destroyed that grouping, al-
though I perceive, once and again, belated stragglers like
Mrs. Gerould make lamentable attempts at some reassertion
of it. Some of those younger novelists have already ceased to
entertain us; two of the ablest of them, E. M. Foster and
D. H. Lawrence, have published no fiction within the last
five years. On the other hand, new and admirable exaiyiples
of the younger fiction have appeared — Frank Swinnerton,
Ethel Sidgwick, Brett Young, Frederick Niven (the best
Scottish novelist since the author of "The House of the
Green Shutters"), Clemence Dane, Virginia Woolf. Books
so opposite as J. D. Beresford's "God's Counterpoint,
Swinnerton's "Nocturne," Brett Young's "Crescent Moon,
Compton Mackenzie's "Poor Relations," and Clemence Dane's
"Legend" prove quite clearly at this moment both that no
general grouping is possible and that much work is being
done in England that is valuable and of important promise.

Camps are formed, battles are fought, criticism is active and
alive. The future of the novel so far as England is concerned
should be eventful and dramatic.

What of the novel in America ? Here, also, there are pessi-
mists. I believe there to be small justification for that
pessimism. It seems to be true that the American novelists
of the older school are, with the definite exceptions of Booth
Tarkington and Ellen Glasgow, scarcely maintaining their
earlier standards. Some of them, like Owen Wister and Mary
Wilkins Freeman, have apparently said their say. Others,

THE ART OF JAMES BRANCH CABELL

like Edith Wharton, have been interrupted by the recent war.

No visitor can be six months in America, however, without
realizing with an eager sense of excitement the new literature
which the country is now producing. It is not my province
to speak of poetry or belles-lettres, but the novel offers exam-
ples enough. There is, for instance, Joseph Hergesheimer,
who has received in England a more eager critical attention
than any American novelist since Stephen Crane and Frank
Norris. There is Miss Gather, whose "O Pioneers!" and
"My Antonia" are masterpieces of American life and ideas.
There is Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio," and Mr.
Fuessle's "Flail." Add the stories of Harvey O'Higgins
and Fannie Hurst and Edna Ferber, and the humor, abso-
lutely new, utterly American, of Don Marquis, Ring Lardner,
and George Ade. I mention writers who have given me
pleasure in the six months of my stay here; there must be
many others whose work limitations of time have hindered
me from approaching. Here, at any rate, is sufficient challenge
to any pessimist, and such critics as H. L. Mencken, Burton
Rascoe, Francis Hackett, and others are making the challenge
sufficiently audible. There is a new American fiction — fiction
that has burst the sentimental bonds that so long bound it.
Foreigners need no longer hesitate in despair between the
slushy stupidity of the imbecile Far Western story and the
innocent melodramatics of the New York chronicle. Here is
now God's plenty at last, and it will be a happy thing for the
world outside when the full discovery of this is made.

There is also James Branch Cabell. No one travelling
around the United States of America during these last months,
no one at least who is interested in literature, can escape the
persistent echo of that name. It may be since the stupid and
entirely ludicrous censorship of "Jurgen" that Mr. Cabell has
floated into a new world of discussion. I don't know. I
am definitely speaking of the period anterior to that censor-
ship. I had not been two weeks in the United States before
someone said to me: "Well, at any rate, there is Cabell."
That was a new name to me. I was gfiven "Beyond Life" to
read. My excitement during the discovery of that perverse

THE ART OF JAMES BRANCH CABELL

and eloquent testament was one of the happiest moments of
my American stay. I spent then a wild and eccentric search
after his earlier masterpieces. Inside the cover of "Beyond
Life" there were the titles of no less than fourteen books.
I could see from the one which I held in my hand that Mr.
Cabell was no careless writer. He had been writing then for
many years and he was unobtainable ! "No, he has never had
any success," a bookseller told me. "No one ever asks for his
books/*

That situation is now changed. There are, I imagine, a
great many more persons in the United States of America
asking for "Jurgen" than are likely to obtain it. That good,
at any rate, an idiotic censorship has done.

I have now, after six months' hard work, secured all the
works of James Branch Cabell save only the records of his
Virginian ancestors and relations, the chronicle of whose
nativities and mortalities is not intended for a visiting
stranger. I have read them all, and I am amazed that this
remarkable and origihal talent has been at America's service
for nearly twenty years, its patient waiting entirely unre-
warded whether by the public or the critics or even the
superior cranks.

Let it be said at once that Cabell's art will always be a
sign for hostilities. Not only will he remain, in all prob-
ability, forever alien to the general public, but he will also,
I suspect, be to the end of time a cause for division among
cultivated and experienced readers.

His style is also at once a battleground. It is the easiest
thing in the world to denounce it as affected, perverse, un-
natural, and forced. It would be at once an artificial style
were it not entirely natural to the man. Anyone who reads
the books in their chronological sequence will perceive the
first diffident testing of it in such early works as "Chivalry"
and "Gallantry"; then the acquiescence in it, as though the
writer said to himself — "Well, this is what I am — I will rebel
against it no longer"; and the final triumphant perfection of
it in "Beyond Life" and "Jurgen."

Mr. Cabell began to write when the romantic movement

THE ART OF JAMES BRANCH CABELL

was in full swing. Stevenson had left behind him a fine crop
of cloak and sword artifices. These were the days of Crock-
ett and Weyman. Of "When Knighthood was in Flower,"
of "The Heart of Princess Osra," of "Richard Carvel," and
"Janice Meredith," and finally of "The Forest Lovers."
In the fierce swing back towards realism that followed we
were carried, it may be, too far in the opposite direction.
It is probable that Cabell was conscious in the very beginning
of this impending reaction. In both "Chivalry" and "Gal-
lantry" there is a note of irony far indeed from the innocent
sentimentalities of his romantic competitors, but it is, as
yet, irony very slightly enforced. "Chivalry" need not detain
us, although it seems most strange that there were so few
readers of that volume to detect in the swing of the prose, the
brilliance of the coloring, and the gay movement of the figures
something exceptional and arresting.

"Gallantry" is a more serious affair. At first sight, with
its "Proems" and pictures by Howard Pyle and "Explicits"
and the rest, it seems to be of the Maurice Hewlett school.
Cabell has inherited these paraphernalia, and it looks now
as though he will always retain them. A kind of defiant
flag flung against the camp of the realists — irritating them,
indeed, quite as sufficiently as the author can ever have
expected.

''Gallantry" is in its inception a string of stories about
the Jacobean period in England and France. It has all th^
right furniture ; the masculine heroine scorning the effeminate
hero, the eavesdropping behind screens, the duel in the woods,
the magnanimous man of iron, the flippant exquisite, the
last moment's rescue. Cabell uses these with a delightful
gusto, but they are old tricks, and some of them are allowed
a too frequent repetition. Nevertheless, here for the first
time some of the author's peculiar gifts are apparent. The
stories are quite definitely independent, with the very slightest
links connecting them, and yet, in these links and in the
abundant and amusingly mock serious politics scattered about
the pages, there is Cabell's first hint to the reader that he is
building something more than a merely imposing erection.

8 THE ART OF JAMES BRANCH CABELL

If the reader will follow all the stories in the volume in their
given sequence, he will gradually perceive that a world of
politics and permanent history is passing before him, and be-
hind this world there is a deeper world still, a world that has
no boundary of material time, a background against which the
figures of the mythology of Greece and Rome and Egypt and
the Middle Ages, of the eighteenth century and the twentieth,
mingle with equal sight and equal blindness.

The two chief masculine figures of these tales, the Duke of
Ormskirk and the dastardly Vanringham, demonstrate the
first placing upon the stage of Cabell's two dominant actors.
These figures are recurrent through all the later books, and
I have heard it urged in adverse criticism that the author is
monotonous in his use of them. I believe the exact opposite
to be the truer judgment. The author, as is apparent in his
later inclusion of all his novels under the single term "Biog-
raphy," is engaged in the history of the human soul. His
books, the reader gradually perceives, are simply varying
chapters of the Wandering Jew. He may appear as Orms-
kirk or Vanringham, as Wycherley or Pope or Sheridan, as
Jurgen or Falstaff, as the modern Charteris or Felix Kennas-
ton; behind the ephemeral body the features of the longing,
searching, questing soul are the same. There is here, as I
think there has never so deliberately been in the work of any
single novelist before, the history of an eternal, ceaseless
quest.

So soon as the reader discovers this intention, the books
fall quite simply into line. From "The Soul of Melicent," one
of the most beautiful and moving of the books, to "The Rivet
in Grandfather's Neck," the most modern of the novels, it
IS scarcely so much a series of stories as a succession of in-
stalments in one long history. The volume of tales known
as "The Certain Hour" gives this most plainly. Outwardly
and for the casual reader, these are stories concerned with the
hour when the poet comes into sudden, flashing, blinding
contact with beauty. From the mists and bizarre splendors
of the Middle Ages, through the Elizabethan seventeenth

THE ART OF JAMES BRANCH CABELL

and the Queen Anne eighteenth centuries, through the humors
of Sheridan and nineteenth-century Grub Street to the modern
Virginian world the poet's quest of beauty persists, hoping,
suddenly exultant, ultimately defeated. The stories are told
with varying success. The Shakespeare story, like all Shake-
speare stories, is disappointing ; the Sheridan episode definitely
poor ; the Herrick chronicle, to one reader at any rate, puzzling
and obscure. But the two mediaeval histories are excellent,
the Wycherley comedy delightful, and the Pope adventure
surely one of the best short stories in the English language.
"The Certain Hour" is, I believe, the only book by Mr. Cabell
yet published in England. It fell, I am informed, dead at its
birth. Was there not a single critic in England aware of
that chronicle of Mr. Pope's love affair, and were the book-
shops of London and Edinburgh so overloaded with master-
pieces that there was no room for a new one? And, more
serious thought, are we now missing, year by year, other
books that would do credit to our literary history? And yet
I am told continually that never has there been a time when
original talent was so easily recognized. I wonder.

The most casual reader, at the close of "The Certain
Hour," must feel that he has been reading something more
than a series of pleasant stories. Mr. Charteris, dreaming
under the battered statue on the green campus of his Alma
Mater, has obviously some kinship with the figures of the
distant centuries that have preceded him. It has been then
a story of reincarnation — 'Kipling's "Brushwood Boy,'*
Arnold's "Phra the Phoenician," and the rest. And yet not
that entirely. In most reincarnation stories it is the con-
trast of the backgrounds that gives the interest to the per-
formance. Here, it is the central figure that matters. The
pathos of the poet, his frustration and still, at the very last,
his persistent hope, makes the varying centuries of scarcely
any effect, so immortal is it.

"It is only by preserving faith in human dreams that we
may, after all, perhaps some day make them come true."
This text from **The Cream of the Jest" is at the very heart

10 THE ART OF JAMES BRANCH CABELL

of all this long chronicle. In spite of its qualifying clauses
it is Cabell's final assertion of immortality. His hero is,
after all, even now, only in the midst of his quest.

We come, then, to the modern novels, the modern frag-
ments in the. long, as yet uncompleted history. These are
"The Eagle's Shadow," "The Cords of Vanity," and "The
Rivet in Grandfather's Neck." These three of all the books
are the most vulnerable to attack. They must seem to the
reader who picks them up casually, confused, unpleasant, and
uncompleted. "The Eagle's Shadow," which is an early work,
need not detain us. "The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck" re-
mains a very admirable example of Cabell's modern work. It
is, superficially, the familiar story of the old husband and the
young wife. It has pathos, humor, a pleasant background of
modern Virginia; but, when it is read without any sense of
the general scheme of which it forms a part, it must appear
unsatisfactory. Mr. Cabell is always more deeply interested
in the stream of life that flows beneath his characters than in
the characters themselves. In the accepted, conventional sense
of the word he is scarcely a novelist at all. He takes shock-
ing liberties with his individuals as human beings. He is not,
I think, very deeply aware of the motives that move ordinary
minds. He is not, in the debased Freudian sense, a modern
psychologist ; we may thank heaven that he is not — ^there are
plenty of others. It follows that the heroine of "The Rivet"
is' irrational and spasmodic.

She loves and she loves not, she accepts and she rejects,
and the reader must simply take the author's word for it.
Mr. Cabell here is too ready to cover up weak spots with a
motto, an epigram, a footnote. "This is really not my game
at all," he seems to say to us. "I don't understand the stupid
female. I have to include her because my Eternal Hero meets
her at this moment, but I know very little about her and
she is not important."

All this is simply to emphasize that Cabell is not a modern
realist. In "Beyond Life," which is his magtiificent, un-
equivocal, defiant testament, he proclaims again and again
that he is not. We have had quite enough in modern criticism

THE ART OF JAMES BRANCH CABELL 11

of the determination of critics to force writers into some
shape or form that they could never possibly support. There
is no need to commit this crime over Cabell, but it is a
legitimate criticism, I think, that, being what he is, he would
be wiser to leave alone themes that demand realism and
psychological analysis for true revelation. Nevertheless, the
very limitations of "The Cords of Vanity" and "The Rivet
in Grandfather's Neck" make them remarkable books. They
are unlike any other novels in the English language. The
nearest in kind are the "Halfway House" and the "Open
Country" of Maurice Hewlett, but those comedies have
nothing of Cabell's peculiar qualities ' and are orderly and
straightforward histories compared with these odd Virginian
ironies.

"The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck" concluded Cabell's
middle period. It is with these latest works — "The Cream
of the Jest," "Beyond Life," and "Jurgen"— that he has
reached the full command of his talent. Among many true
and many false things that George Moore has said in the
course of his self-revealing history there is that admirable
verity: "All except an emotional understanding is worthless
in art." That is so true that it is astonishing that so many
honest critics should be able to forget it. But the converse
is also true, namely, that there is nothing so blinding to true
criticism as an emotional understanding.

I am very conscious of this same converse in my estima-
tion of these three books of Mr. Cabell's. I know that they
are not perfect. I am aware that greater than they have been
written in the past and that, in all probability, greater than
they will be written again. I am aware also that con-
temporary criticism must be, nine times out of every ten, a
case of blind leading the blind. Nevertheless, with the single
exception of Joseph Hergesheimer's work, I know of no three
books by one and the same author written in the last ten
years that have given me so vivid a sense of a new, defiant,
and genuine personality, whose arrival on the scene must
make a definite impression upon English literature. Whom
have we had within the last ten years? Mr. E. M. Forster

12 THE ART OF JAMES BRANCH CABELL

ceased to write with "Howard's End," which was published,
I think, in 1910. Mr. D. H. Lawrence? The impression made
by "Sons and Lovers" was not confirmed. Edgar Lee
Masters? To me, at any rate, the author of one book. Mr.
Lytton Strachey? So far only one book. James Joyce?
•"Ulysses" is surely a poor second to "The Portrait of an
Artist." Virginia Woolf? "Night and Day" is not quite so
g"ood as "The Voyage Out"; it ought to have been better.
Sporadic works of individual talent, quite a number ; and there
are the poets — Robert Nichols, Sassoon, Vachel Lindsay,
Robert Frost, and many others. But I am only the more
strongly confirmed in my confidence after such a retrospect
that no writer, new to us in the last ten years, has revealed,
in English, so arresting a personality as has James Branch
Cabell in these three books.

What do we ask for in a new writer? Individuality, inde-
pendence of thought, courage, and above all what George
Moore (to quote him once again) has called "the great
realism of the idea." All these things are in the three books
absolutely displayed. You may dislike "Beyond Life"; it
may irritate you profoundly. You may curse the man's
affectations and poses (they are of course not affectations
and poses at all). You may condemn him as narrow and
pedantic and far from life as it is. He acknowledges all these
things. He calls his book "Beyond Life," and it is on the
world beyond life that his gaze is resolutely fixed. That will
naturally irritate you whose duty it is to number the holes
in the spout of your neighbor's gardening watering-can.
But at least you must admit that he has been truthful with
you. His man Charteris says at once: "It is by the grace
of romance that man has been exalted above the other
animals," and in close connection with this: "The comer-
stone of chivalry I take to be the idea of vicarship; for the
chivalrous person is, in his own eyes at least, the child of
God, and goes about this world as his Father's representative
in an alien country."

"Beyond Life" directs this gospel especially towards litera-
ture, and in a series of statements, Charteris, the author's

THE ART OF JAMES BRANCH CABELL 13

mouthpiece, examining the art of Marlowe, Congreve, Sheri-
dan, Dickens, Thackeray, brings us finally to our own day.
In his indictment of modern realism he goes, as the author
is delightfully aware, beyond the bounds of truth and plausi-
bility, and the later chapters of the book may be read side
by side with Frank Swinnerton's indictment of romance in
his study of Robert Louis Stevenson. Here is a piquant
study in contrasts. But Mr. Cabell knows well enough that
his Charteris is going too far; a delightful irony pervades
the book and involves Charteris himself in its atmosphere.
In his final pages he is concerned perhaps too closely with
ephemeral literature. Need Mr, Charteris disturb himself
so deeply over the popularities of Mr. Harold Bell Wright
and Mr. Zane Grey ? Moreover, towards the last, the crabbed
and irritable personality of the little jaundiced author separates
itself quite deliberately from its creator. Charteris, in these
determinate paragraphs, is the villain of "The Rivet in Grand-
father's Neck." We are aware of his earlier history and are
uncomfortable in contemplation of him.

"Romance," we are told here, "is an expression of an atti-
tude which views life with profound distrust, as a business
of exceeding dulness, and of very little worth."

That was never Mr. Cabell's judgment, and we cannot but
feel that at the last it is the author rather than Charteris that
we would prefer to hear.

And, after all, it is in the final paragraph Mr. Cabell him-
self to whom we are listening:

"We are being made into something quite unpredictable,
I imagine; and through the purging and smelting we are
sustained by an instinctive knowledge that we are being made
into something better. For this we know, quite incom-
municably, and yet as surely as we know that we will to
have it thus.

"It is this will that stirs in us to have the creatures of
earth and the affairs of earth, not as they are, but as 'they
ought to be,' which we call romance. But when we note how
visibly it sways all life we perceive that we are talking about
God."

14 THE ART OF JAMES BRANCH CABELL

After finishing "Beyond Life/' the reader should at once
move on to "The Cream of the Jest" to observe how pre-
cept "may be turned into practice/* This work, although
"Jurgen" is more entertaining, more various, more complete,
and more humorous, is the best summary of Mr. Cabell's
art that we have.

In scheme it amplifies the machinery of "Chivalry" and "The
Line of Love" and reminds us of Wells's "Time Machine"
and many another less able fairy story. Kennaston, the
author, whom we have met before, from whose works Mr.
Cabell has frequently quoted, adequately but unromantically
married, finds a piece of metal that transports him, through
dreams, back into certain existences. The metal is the
Nessus shirt of "Jurgen," the talisman that Mr. Cabell must
always carry with him in order that dreams may begin as
soon as possible.

In this story there is nothing very striking and, as always
in Mr. Cabell's books, the story is most -certainly "not the
thing." What is the thing here is Kennaston's passionate,
poignant longing for the active realizing of his fugitive
dreams. Again and again, as I have said before, this long-
ing has been Mr. Cabell's theme, but he has never in any
other work expressed it so clearly, so dramatically, so beau-
tifully, so truthfully.

From the merely technical point of view the little cameos
of vanished moments in past civilizations are admirable. So
often this has been attempted, so often the attempt has failed.
How vivid for instance such a vignette as this:

"Again Kennaston stood alone before a tall window, made
up of many lozenge-shaped panes of clear glass set in lead
framework. He had put aside one of the two great curtains
— of a very fine stuflf like gauze, stitched over with trans-
parent, glittering beetle-wings and embroidered with tiny
seed pearls — ^which hung before this window.

"Snow covered the expanse of housetops without, and the
sky without was glorious with chill stars. That white city
belonged to him, he knew, with a host of other cities. He
was the strongest of kings. People dreaded him, he knew ; and

THE ART OF JAMES BRANCH CABELL IS

he wondered why anyone should esteem a frail weakling such
as he to be formidable. The hand of this great king — his
own hand — that held aside the curtain before him, was
shrivelled and colorless as lambs* wool. It was like a horrible
bird claw."

Kennastoii, his hero, thus pursues through the centuries
his dreams and so resolves himself as another manifestation
of the eternal Cabell figure.

The physical trappings do not matter. In himself he is
less than nothing, in his purpose everything. Of him the
author says: "He could face no decision without dodging;
no temptation v/ithout compromise; and he lied, as if by
instinct, at the threatened approach of discomfort or of his
fellows' disapproval: yet devils, men, and seraphim would
conspire in vain in any effort to dissuade him from his self-
elected purpose." ,

So when we come to Mr. Cabell's final and at present most
famous figure, Jurgen, we find him to be*a dirty little paunch-
bellied pawnbroker of the Middle Ages, tied to a shrew of a
wife, of a niggardly, cowardly nature.

Jurgen's history has been accused of many ancestries.
Froni Rabelais to Lord Dunsany authorities have been quoted
and emphasized. I don't think that any reader of the book
need worry over this. Jurgen is born of a mind teeming with
literature; he is the descendant of many centuries, many
libraries, many stories and chronicles, but at the last he is his
author's own child, original and defiant in his own right, owing
no man anything for his ultimate personality.

Nor do I think that the reader need worry himself here
about symbols, metaphors, and philosophies. "The High His-
tory of Jurgen" is precisely what any reader chooses to make it.
It is not for every reader any more than are the earlier Cabell
books. Some will find it heavy, some tedious, some puzzling
and wajrward; and some, as it appears according to the
Comstockians, find it improper. This censorship quarrel is an
old one, but while the Bible, Rabelais, Gautier, Fielding, and
the rest are open before us, and while the latest Midnight
Revues are delighting New York, it seems something absurd

16 THE ART OF JAMES BRANCH CABELL

and not a little pathetic that one of the few original works
of literature that the English language has fumishea us lately
should be taken away from us. This, however, is a matter
of no lasting importance. Jurgen will survive no matter what
the Comstockians may do to him. He has the gaiety and
beauty of permanence about him ; the Nessus shirt is not easily
destroyed by a policeman's baton.

This at least may be said : If "J^^gen" is read simply for
amusement, for the humor and brilliance of its episodes, for
the drama of chapters, like the adventure with Guenevere,
the fall of Pseudopolis, the episodes in hell, and, above kll,
the meeting with his grandmother's God in heaven, there is
benefit and happiness enough to be got from the book. Noth-
ing can be harder to write than fantasy of this kind, and yet
for one reader, at least, the story never flags, the interest is
never dropped, the humor and beauty and very gentle irony
are everywhere present.

Finally, it is the crown of Mr. Cabell's work. He is, as
writers go, a young man. He has, in air probability, many
years of fine and successful labor in front of him, but, were
he never to publish another line, he has, with three books,
staked his claim and taken his place. Jurgen is the most
triumphant manifestation of that travelling soul who remains,
from first to last, his unfaltering subject.

And, with the ending of Jurgen's chronicle, we can acclaim
with no uncertain voice the definite arrival of a talent as
original and satisfying as anything that our time has seen.

BOOKS BY MR. CABELL

In Genealogical Sequence, with Some Description and Comment

17

BEYOND LIFE

{Dizain des Demiurges)

The row over James Branch Cabell, intermittently breaking out, with
gradually increasing choler, for a year or so past, should be vastly stimu-
lated by Beyond Life, for in it, instead of attempting to placate his de-
tractors, he deliberately has at them with all arms.

Is art representation? A thousand times, Pish I Art is a dream of
perfection, art is a projection of fancy, art is a "rumor of dawn," art is
an escape from life! Down with all the dolts who merely set up
cameras and squeeze bulbs I Down, again, with the donkeys who mount
soap-boxes and essay to read morals into life, to make it logical and
mathematical, to rationalize it, to explain it The thing is not to be
rationalized and explained at all — ^that is the eternal charm of it.

It is to be admired, experimented with, toyed with, wondered at. It-
self a supreme adventure, it is the spring and end of all other adventure
— especially of the ever-entrancing adventure into ideas. And, above all,
let us not get into wraths about it — ^let us not torture ourselves wuth the
maudlin certainties that make for indignation.

Life is a comedy to him, etc., etc . . . Say that the Walpolean spirit
is in Cabell, and you have described him perhaps as accurately as it may
be done. His frequent ventures into the eighteenth century are not ac-
cidental, but inevitable. It was the century of sentiment, but it was also,
in its top layers, the century of a fine and exhilarating skepticism.

This skepticism is what chiefly gives character to Cabell, and sets him
off so sharply from an age of oafish faiths, of imbecile enthusiasms,
of unearthly and innumerable sure cures, of incredible credulities. This
is the thing in him that outrages the simple-minded, and causes them
to fall upon him furiously, not merely for what they conceive to be sins
aesthetical, but also for what appears to their disordered ire as a vague
and sinister inner depravity. To laugh at certainty as he laughs at it
is inordinately offensive to the right-minded, and in the course of time,
as the war upon intelligence makes progress, it will probably become
jailable.

Yet there he holds the fort, disdainfully convinced that artificiality, is
the only true reality. And there he fashions books in a hard and brittiaat
style — the last word in artful and arduous craftsmanship among U9— <•
Paterism somehow humanized and made expansive.

I wonder what the amazed old maids, male and female, of the news-
papers will call Beyond Life — ^novel, book of essays, or apologia pro vita
sua? If novel, then it is a strange novel indeed, for there is but one
character, and he talks steadily from page 23 to the end. If book of

18

INDIVIDUAL COMMENT 19

essays, then where are the essays? — surely these rolling discourses are
nothing of the sort And if apologia, then why not an occasional apology?
The college professors of the literary weeklies, with their dusty shelf of
pigeon-holes, have work for them here. As for the rest of us, all
we need do is read on, enjoying the fare as we go.

What is it? In brief, excellent reading— shy, insinuating learning;
heterodoxy infinitely gilded; facts rolled out to fragile thinness and cut
into pretty figures; above all a sure and delicate sense of words, a style
at once exact and undulatev very caressing writing. In detail, much
shrewd discussion of this and that, with many a Hash of sound criticism.
... A singular and fascinating book I — H. L. Mencken, in The Smart Set.

DOMNEI

{J Comedy of W oman-ky orship)

Alluring as the spirit of youth may be, it is not possible to admire
all the novels into which the glory of that spirit is poured. There is a
youth wholly without charm; there is another youth so overflowing with
that divine essence that one forgives all its other shortcomings because of
it In writing, and particularly in writing of young love, there is no
quality so necessary as this indefinable charm; no quality that brings a
swifter reward of laughter or tears from the reader; no quality that is
at once so apparent and so gratefully recognized.

Now in Domnei I find this spirit prodigally in evidence. • , . Here is a
man with an individual style, who can recast and reilluminate the ancient
forms and shadows, and make a glory and a dream.

Melicent, of noble birth, falls in love with Perion, an outlaw, and, un-
able to conquer this man of iron, finally, in the very beginning of the
romance, proposes to him. Mr. Cabell handles this queer scene with all
the delicacy and deftness of the consummate artist, and makes it con-
vincing and beautiful, difficult as it must have been to do so.

Soon Melicent is robbed of her lover, and is forced to be the chattel
of the evil and powerful Demetrios. How the latter is first uppermost in
the struggle for the maid, and then overpowered by Perion; how the
Jew Ahasuerus connives against her, and how Melicent and Perion, after
years of waiting and longing, are thrown again into each other's arms
—these contrivances are made to serve — ^but in how new and wonderful
a wayl

When the story is finished one wonders how Mr. Cabell, despite the
beautiful trick of forcing the reader to believe that the tale has been
evolved from old French sources, has contrived such glowing color.
This is no sickly effeminate tale, but a vigorous rush and roar of splendid
action that sweeps you on to a quiet but brilliant conclusion. A man
has learned to write when he can throw in a poetic passage like this

20 THE ART OF JAMES BRANCH CABELL

(and how crowded with them the story is!) : "She sat erect in bed, and
saw him cowering over a lamp which his long glistening fingers shielded,
so that the lean face of the man floated upon a little golden pool in the
darkness."

No artist can really help one who has mastered the use of words as
Mr. Cabell has done. Each sentence is a picture. It is a charming book,
a passionate romance that should have an abiding place upon one's
shelves. — Charles Hanson Towne, in Cincinnati Enquirer.

The love of Melicent and Perion, brought together from scattered
fragments in old chronicles and retold by James Branch Cabell, is a
very perfect specimen of mediaeval love. The real content of mediaeval
love is objective, the service rendered to the beloved. • . .

The logical climax is the instant when Perion and Melicent come face
to face at last, after long hardships suffered, death outfaced and dis-
honor endured in the name of their young love, and Perion, seeing in
her another than the wondrous girl whose image he had cherished through
hard years, is disappointed first, and then is swiftly smitten with a new
and finer love, reward of his suffering and hers, which may safely be
counted on to recompense the faithful and unselfish servants of an ideal.

The solid value of romance, its actual worth in increasing the efficiency
and stability of human nature, is very clearly indicated. . . . Mr. Cabell
is more than a very cunning artificer in lovely words and a student of old
chronicles. He knows, one guesses, why God made artists — ^that high
deeds may not be quite forgotten, that high loves may be kept alive, that
the way of the flesh may sometimes be shown as a sun-path to us, not
always as a dull morass beneath the moon. — The Atlantic Monthly.

CHIVALRY

{Dizain des Reines)

Chivalry is a sequence of studies of the code whose root is "'the as-
sumption that a gentleman will serve his God, his honor, and his lady
without any reservation." . . .

And what, ultimately, is Mr. Cabell's sense of this way to high in-
dividual adventure? It is wholly characteristic of him that whatever
guidance he offers is the guidance of an artist, never of a moralist. His
one inclusive and continuous interest is in the artistic or poetizing temper
— a narrow enough interest in seeming, when so phrased, but expanded
by his tacit definition until it is not only the centre but also the cir-
cumference of everything.

The duality of the world is essentially that of the artistic against the
mediocre ; for the essential part of every being, the one part that can turn
the single life from a sorry jest into a brave spectacle, is the poetic.
The artist in each man requires that he give up every cherished thing

INDIVIDUAL COMMENT 21

for the sake of one thing cherished most. Under this tyranny the lover,
the fighter, the chivalrous gentleman, the quixotic fool, the artist in words,
all sacrifice everything to their own kinds of self-completion; for self-
completion is the law, and attainment of it the only success.

Mr. Cabeirs ideal of success is to reach the consummation of this some-
thing centra] in one's self, and incidentally to miss everything else that
one might have had. His ideal of heroism is to sacrifice all for one's
own kind of perfection and then fail to gain even that, for this is the
one kind of failure that has moral dignity enough to be tragic.

He is at heart, then, a prophet of that austere aesthetic doctrine, the
single-mindedness of the artist. He has made up his mind, it seems,
to the tragic disparity which condemns the perfect writer to be a wretched
bungler at the art of living, the perfect lover a fool in relation to all
affairs save those of the heart, and the man of executive might always
''more or less mentally deficient."

To be perfectly oneself means to miss being everybody else. Whence
Mr. Cabeirs two recurrent characters : the artist lover who is an inferior
citizen, and the writing artist who is an inferior lover. His tales are
populated with lovers who must say with Antoine Riczi: "Love leads us,
and through the sunlight of the world he leads us, and through the filth
of it Love leads us, but always in the end, if we but follow without
swerving, he leads upward. Yet, O God upon the Cross! Thou that in
the article of death didst pardon Dysmas! as what maimed warriors of
life, as what bemired travelers in muddied byways, must be presently
come to Thee !" — ^Wilson Follett, in The Dial.

All the stories are love episodes in the lives of long-dead queens of
England, and none ever more emphasized the truth that although
civilizations, with their creeds and customs, change, human nature is the
same throughout . . •

All these stories are throbbing with that commingling of love and hate,
forgiveness and vengeance, passion and purity, childlikeness and craft,
selfishness and self-sacrifice, which gloried in its sincerity in those lost
seasons when might was ri^ht, and each man stood ready to prove it, to
his own and his lady's satisfaction. Whatever else may be his or her
fault, the hero of each of these fascinating tales is a man; the heroine, a
woman. — Boston Transcript

JURGEN

{A Comedy of Justice)

All the fabulous loveliness that has drugged men with rapture and
death returns in the magic of Jurgen: Guenevere in a robe of flame
colored silk; the pallid charm of Queen Sylvia Tereu vanishing at the
cock's crow ; Anaitis, in Cocaigne, drawing desire into shuddering ecstasies

22 THE ART OF JAMES BRANCH CABELL

of sensation; a brown and dimpled Hamadryad; Dolores of Philistia,
beautiful as a hawk^ but tenderer in the cloak of night; Florimel — in a
quiet cleft by the Sea of Blood — who knew what to do with small un-
christened children; and Phyllis, Satan's wife, an enchanting slip of
devilishness with the wings of a bat

They sway and smile with half closed eyes, and beckon; naked limbs
slide from under embroidery and breasts are bare as the moon; per-
fumed sights float from the scarlet flames of their mouths. They drift
on a higher nebulous cloud, but below them are the evil obscenities
of hell, a blackness with the reflections of coppery embers, the gleam of
red eyes, the swift passage and repassage of unutterable things with
thickly dripping fingers and members of stone.

The gauzy drapery of Anaitis, opening in twenty-two places, flows into
the murk, while her crown of coral is held in the half light; but far
above her is the white and gold immortality, the airy shape of men's
eternal longing, Helen of Troy. Palpable, yet forever beyond attainment,
visible in the manner of an irradiated dream, she gazes downward with
a tender loveliness of veiled eyes. She is the supreme celestial incentive,
the guarded secret, of men fast in the corruption of flesh, of Anaitis, but
with their faces desperately lifted to the perfection of beauty.

However — and here is the potency of Mr. Cabell's magic — there is reach
on reach above even the purity of the Trojan Helen . . . up, up to the
part of Heaven which smelt of mignonette, with a starling singing. And
at the end, at the dissolving of the vapors, while the pits of hell and
painted rosy flesh are consumed, when desire has died of satiety, there
is the reality of Lisa, the transcending sanity of human compan-
ionship, the goodness of the heart and the peace, the wisdom, of under-
standing.

The enchantment of Jurgen, conveyed in pulp and ink, rising from the
gold vessel of Mr. Cabell's imagination, is both a figment and a reality;
the gesture of a hand, the shrill or bland pitch of a voice, holds all of
life, the belly and the instinct of propagation are the mechanical gods of
existence; and, at the same time, they are less than nothing; for the
amazing jangle of fate, of chance, has its sweep not from the sample needs
of animals but from the tyranny of that vision of the flawless Helen, the
shining of the farther ineffable blueness.

The actuality of to-day, authentic history, is solid with fact and reality,
but it is no more potent, no more inwoven in the heart, than the myths
and legends of before Sumeria. Jurgen riding on a centaur into the
past is fantastic, yet compared with the joumeyings of the mind, the dark
corridors and lands and beasts of thought, it is all as ordinary as any
street of the present. And as long as men are touched with hopes be-
yond their reach they will see back of any woman a universal changeless
mystery of desire, at once pure and possessed. — ^Joseph Hergesheimer, in
The New York Sun,

INDIVIDUAL COMMENT 23

THE LINE OF LOVE

(Dizain des Mariages)

Like Aucassin and Nicolete, Mr. CabeH's story is now told in prose and
now in poetry, the poetry coming from the mouths of love-lorn trouba-
dours or of that "sad, bad, glad, mad" poet of "Paris town," Francois
Villon. To what extent these chansons, lais and virelais are translations
from the old French, done with the finest Havor of the translator's
artistry, and to what degree they are the invention of Mr. Cabell, is not
a matter to concern us now.

The inevitable sentiments and phrases of the time are in these formal
yet spontaneous, childish yet wise, poems of troubadours^ and whether
they were indeed writ five centuries ago or yesterday matters little.
They are fragrant with the fragrance of love and roses, rhyme and
dreams, and the potpourri is one for which all who delight in old time
romances must be thankfuL

The thread that holds Mr. Cabell's tales together is the thread or the
"line" of love. From generation to generation the compelling madness
drives these men and women on to their joy or their doom, and they
leave behind them children who also know their "hour of madness and of
joy." It is a love-like thing to have the entree to some poet's Olympus
and watch the impassioned procession of lovers pass like that, and to view
their disasters and their delights with an impersonal eye and an unfail-
ing interest. ...

The charm of those ardent days in which men and women were at once
primitive and elegant, exquisite and brutal, learned and naive, is per-
fectly portrayed in this revival of old tales, which drift "as a blown leaf
across the face of time." — Elia W. Peattie, in The Chicago Tribune,

Purporting to be translations from old French, these stories of poets
and chivalry, of fair ladies and gallant knights, have in them all the
flavor of Middle Age adventure, passionate romantic love and the lyricism
of poets who rise to no greater occasion in their songs than the kissing
of my lady's white hand or the praising of some one of her many per-
sonal charms. But they are not translations; they are not resurrected
from long forsaken, musty parchments: they are the children, a very
creditable offspring, by the way, of Mr. Cabell's imagination. Counter-
feits, one may say, but there are counterfeits and counterfeits in litera-
ture, and some of them may under the law be deemed forgivable. The
Line of Love is one of these.

In the richly colored tapestry that Mr. Cabell, like some Eastern fakir,
unrolls before our view, tapestry thick-woven with threads of gold and
intricately patterned with a host of figures, the one figure that remains
most fixed in our memory is that of the poet Villom A picturesque figure^
whose story has commended itself, time and again, to novelists and poets,
Villon has suffered more through a persistent process of idealization than

24 THE ART OF JAMES BRANCH CABELL

it would ever have been possible for him to suffer through a plain state-
ment of the facts. To these facts, fragmentary and unsatisfactory though
they be, Mr. Cabell has confined himself, and the result is a mixture of
poetic beauty with pathetic realism: it is a strong characterization, yet
it lacks nothing in the romantic element. — 'Norma Bright Carson, in
Book News.

GALLANTRY

(Dizain des Fetes Galantes)

Mr. Cabell's group of eighteenth century scenes has been wrought with
cleverness, tact and invention. He is frankly superficial, and paints his
pictures of George the Second's England, and France under Louis Quinze,
rather in snuflF box style than with any complicated probing after the
eternal human heart.

Of course, it is not every one who cares to collect snuflF boxes, but,
granted the taste, The Casual Honeymoon, all the adventures of Captain
Audaine and Miss Allonby, April's Message, the whole history, in fact,
of Ormskirk's courtings, form as satisfactory specimens as are likely to
be manufactured at the present day. Moreover, in the plots, counter plots,
and intrigues, there is a grateful amount of lively movement

Unlike Thomas Hardy (in his biting eighteenth century studies) or
Maurice Hewlett, Mr. Cabell doe? not attempt to reconstruct character,
to create trenchant personalities. He busies himself about the satin-clad
courtier, the airy fine lady, and the gallant. His miniatures are careful:
though the touch is so light, the style seldom halts, and in the few in-
stances where it lapses from that of his chosen period, it at least
never ceases to be properly suited to the bloody or amorous minuets
through which his puppets are stepping.

In fact (never losing sight of the scale), no more discerning estimate
of Gallantry need be sought than that furnished by Mr. Cabell's own
epilogue, where Ormskirk pleads:

The author's obdurate, and bids me say
That — since the doings of our Georgian day
Smack less of Hippocrene than of Bohea,— •
His tiny pictures of that tiny time
Aim little at the lofty or sublime,
Nor paint a peccadillo as a crime.
Since, though illegally all midges mate.
And flies purloin, and gnats assassinate.
They are not haled before a magistrate.

This is Mr. Cabell's aim, and in large measure he attains it. If it be
objected that life was not then composed exclusively of dispatch boxes^

INDIVIDUAL COMMENT 25

robbers, spies, masqueraders, duels, and evening parties, without a second's
breathing space between, the answer is that exciting rather than common-
place moments have been selected, as better suited to fiction; and not
only selected: they have been trimmed, polished, and refined to a
version suggesting the school of Watteau rather than Hogarth. — The
Nation.

We have not latterly come upon a more delightful work of fiction than
is Gallantry, Mr. Cabell's fine art is attaining a rarer finish as time
rounds his capacities. To a lustrous and dramatic style he unites the
vivid abilities of the born story teller, and while his tragic climaxes often
bring up his readers breathless, the delicacy of his comedy is also in-
finitely alluring and provocative. ... It is the best fiction of its sort in
covers in many a day.— ^9*. Louis Times,

THE CERTAIN HOUR

{Dizain des Poetes)

It is not often that the work of an American writer attracts attention
because of beauty of style. That, unhappily, is a quality which our
"reading public" does not desire of its favorites. Mr. James Branch
Cabell, however, has this attribute to such a degree that, were he not a
master story-teller, still his work must command the enthusiasm of the
discriminating reader. In The Certain Hour, he has selected an idea
which requires his utmost artistry with words.

The volume consists of ten sketches which, as he points out in a
prefatory essay of rare irony anent the public, are not short-stories.
Perhaps they might be described as fragments patterned upon the same
psychological situation in the lives of various poets, finding their in-
dividual color in that of the personalities involved. The idea of selecting
that certain hour in which a man comes face to face with himself re-
vealing the temper of his spirit, is one which would only occur to the
inspired artist

There is in these sketches a wistful and magical quality of sentiment
and a delicacy of workmanship which cannot fail to arouse pleasurable
emotions in anyone who recognizes the master touch. And as stories,
many of them are no less than thrilling, and that without the trickery
of the magazine writer. — ^Martyn Johnson, in The Dial

The Certain Hour I heartily commend to the student of letters. Mr.
Cabell's gallant and wholesome reaction from the popular school of "vital"
fiction carries' him, I think, into self-conscious perversities. He writes
with one eye open toward teasing the bourgeois. . . . What are we to
say of one who calls a preface an "auctorial induction"? His love of a
cavalierish past leads him into strange byways of life and passion that
are outlandish to the humble reader.

26 THE ART OF JAMES BRANCH CABELL

But it is refreshing to find a writer announcing it as his creed "To
write perfectly of beautiful happenings. . . . One finds in his pages an
exquisite quality of craftsmanship that in its self-conscious splendor
recalls Oscar Wilde. One meets a mind that has lovingly brooded over
the pageant of English literature, and reproduced with fantastic cunning
the color of bygone days.

Mr. Cabell condemns our machine-made fiction of to-day. "Indis-
putably the most striking defect of this modem American literature" (he
says) "is the fact that anything at all resembling literature is scarcely
anywhere apparent. The nineteenth century by making education popular
has produced the curious spectacle of a reading public with essentially
non-literary tastes."

Mr. Cabell does not relish the fact that thousands of plain Americans
really enjoy the treacle of Mrs. Gene Stratton Porter and the brimstone
of Mr. Harold Bell Wright. He turns lovingly in thought to the days
when books were the delight of a chosen few; when the country gentle-
man of Virginia, after a long day with the hounds, would spend the even-
ing by his log fire with port wine on the table and a spaniel at his feet,
savoring Montaigne or Sir Thomas Browne.

Mr. Cabell is really an Elizabethan who finds himself something at
odds with our hubble-bubble democracy. And those who delight in the
finer sensations of literature will find an inordinate satisfaction in his
very delicate stories of the loves of men of letters. Shakespeare,
Herrick, Wycherley, Pope, Sheridan, and some others whom you will
not find in the textbooks are the heroes of his stories, and in his pages
they speak in their own manner and are set about with language daintily
phrased and of a rare cadence. — Christopher Morley, in Educational
Foundations,

THE CORDS OF VANITY

{A Comedy of Shirking)

The Cords of Vanity, by James Branch Cabell, is a brilliantly writ-
ten story of a hero who degenerates progressively, a hero whom we
follow through a litany of love aflFairs, and whom we leave at the
end in a very unstable equilibrium of virtue. The book is one more
study of the "artistic temperament," that convenient term under which
genius or near-genius often finds shelter to indulge its selfishness and

caprice.

Mr. Cabell gives an airy chronicle of the love afiFairs of his hero,
Robert Townsend — ^a continuous performance extending from childhood
to the thirties, although the irresponsible "Bobby" is described as one
who has adopted "infancy" as a profession, and never gets out of boy-
hood. Townsend is also described as one of the self-hypnotized persons
who, in the moment of sa)ring it, believes everything that he says, and

INDIVIDUAL CXDMMENT 27

thus romances alluringly of himself with no regard to the fetters of
fact — truly a captivating liar.

In this "higher carelessness" all his contradictions and repetitions are
merged into a fine unity. By playing at emotion so long he finally breaks
down the inward integrities, so that he is not able to realize when he is
acting a part and when he is sincere. And his sin overtakes him in the
circumstance that, having played at love so long, he finally is not able
to love anybody in reality. He is punished terribly: "for the saddest
punishment of all is something that happens in us, not something that
happens to us."

As the author omits to cite in good round terms the moral that we may
learn from this story, some people seem to think that the book carries
no moral. Now, a book to be artistic must be moral, for life is moral,
and art is only life focussed and colored by the lens of personality.
Moreover, it is a principle of literature that a moral is preached most
loudly without hymn or homily. It should be pressed in upon the
reader through the happenings of the story. We never fail to get the
moral impression if the author is veracious and unfolds life in the iron
law of consequences.

Now, in reading the record of this rather shameless hero we cannot
fail to note and deplore the gradual unmanning of this inveterate sensa-
tion-seeker, Mr. Robert Townsend; nor can we fail to close the book
with a lively desire to have no closer acquaintance with his kind. This
is the moral driven home to our hearts. — Edwin Markham, in the N. Y,
American,

There is a sort of inward satisfaction gained in reading such a book
as Mr. Cabeirs Cords of Vamty. No one ever talks with the flippant
irony, the satiric humor, the fantastic brilliance of these characters. In
our more prosaic conversation of the day how often we think of the
quick retort when the chance for displaying our rhetorical fireworks has
just slipped by. But in Mr. CabelFs pages all this is remedied. Those
quips and subtle turns of meaning come from the mouths of the char-
acters as the most spontaneous utterances in the world — ^and we delight
in the conceit of it. . . . For the sophisticated the book will be a real
delight — Boston Transcript,

FROM THE HIDDEN WAY

(Selections in Verse from the Private Papers of R. E. Townsend)

Love and springtime were the two great subjects of the troubadours.
Simple dreamers, they spent their days in an idealization of the two
forces that are still the most beautiful things in life. They sought no
tortuous paths of involved intellectual struggle. Life they accepted mutely,
and the fair things in life won them to unpremeditated song. To-day

28 THE ART OF JAMES BRANCH CABELL

the thrill that lay in their poetry is not a dead one. Although the sun
has burst forth in ruddy splendor on the world through multitudes of
poems the rapture that held the troubadours still holds us. It is of love
and springtime that James Branch Cabell sings in his volume of verse»
From the Hidden Way,

One who has read the previous books of Mr. Cabell knows that it is
ancient France and Italy that have his heart. Naturally it is to those
older poets that sang in those lands that he turns. Ostensibly each poem
is a translation or a paraphrase of some song of a dead poet, but the
spirit of James Branch Cabell finds its expression, too, in the verses.
How much is translation, and how much is Cabell, it is hard to say, but
it is a free guess that the translator has freely paraphrased his
originals.

He finds his inspiration from all sources. Among some of the writers
that he seeks material from are Antoine Riczi, Alessandro de Medici,
Theodore Passerat, Charles Garnier, Nicolas de Caen, Francois Villon,
Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, Paul Verville, and Alphonse Moreau. A num-
ber are attributed to no writer and are the author's own.

It is the spirit of the past that Mr. Cabell is especially fortunate in
capturing. One may easily believe that the poems are the original unpre-
meditated efforts of the authors whose names are attached to the head
of them. They are more than translations. They are reconstructions
of long-dead moods as authentic and as touching as they were in the
days when the fiery-hearted singers felt them. . . .

Taken all in all. From the Hidden Way is a decidedly pleasing book.
Its quality is unquestioned, and the recapturing of a bygone age is re-
markable. Mr. Cabell has written a book that every poetry lover should
have. — ^A. L. S. Wood, in the Springfield Union.

Mr. Cabell makes seventy-five adaptations from mediaeval rhymers,
Moreau, Passerat, Alessandro de Medici, Nicolas de Caen, Paul Verville
and others. In rendering, or rather adapting, these mediaeval poets into
English, Mr. Cabell has made the art his own. The sprightliness, color
and spirit of a romantic age are revived in these poems. — ^Wiluam
Stanley Braithwaite, in The Bookman,

In a collection so thronged with vibrant chords all resonant of the
ages-old themes of love and life and death, it is not possible in this
limited space to convey to the reader the subtlety of Mr. Cabell's art.
He has sensed the power of the minnesingers as if to the period born, as,
perhaps, he was in some previous incarnation. Possibly, Passerat or
Moreau, or even Alessandro de Medici, was his former habitat. At any
rate, they live again in him, which is more to the point. Whether it is
Villon musing in prison, with the rope awaiting him at dawn for his sins,
or the Dark Venus is invoked, or Ronsard returns with one of his half-
forgotten rhymes, the touch is sure, the craft is ever present — ^Samuel
Travers Clover, in the Richmond Journal,

INDIVIDUAL COMMENT 29

THE RIVET IN GRANDFATHER'S NECK

{A Comedy of Limitations)

If you see on the bookstands a volume entitled The Rivet in Grand-
father's Neck, buy it and read it; for it's good stuff. James Branch
Cabell wrote it It is done in ironic "highfalutinese" and the im-
passioned "Southron" will writhe as he reads, even though he laugh at
the same time, for here the chivalries aristocratic superstition of the
South is ridiculed with a gay contempt, the worse for its being shot
through with tenderness for the victims of the tradition.

How utterly unrelated to and unfit for this workaday world the old
cult of "blood" has become, was never so grindingly yet so graceftdly
shown as in the middle-aged hero of this tale who marries the daughter
of a rich contractor and practically loses her because he does nothing
for her but vaporize sentimentally while living on her money, and remains
unconsciously, ridiculously selfish in his idealism. The "blood" tradition
is the rivet in the toy grandfather's neck that prevents his resilience.

The girl in the story isn't quite loveable, but she's human in the same
way as her husband, and between them they make a sad boggle of life.
There's another murderously dextrous portraiture in the book — ^that of
the autolatrous successful novelist who thinks his genius demands disre-
gard of moral inhibitions ; a viler Sentimental Tommy.

James Branch Cabell in this book has done something Cervantesque—
there's no other word for it — in smiling a false chivalry away. And it's
deadlier for that the writer does it with mockery of the courtier grace
of which his victims have ever been enamored in life and in literature, and
with the hurt fullest thing of all in a wound-infiicter — ^pity. A romanticist
exposing romanticism's hollowness and sham; such is Mr. James Branch
Cabell in this cavalier comedy of acid satire.-— William Marion Reedy, in
Reedy's Mirror,

Speaking of names of novels, how about The Rivet in Grandfather's
Neck? This is the title of James Branch Cabell's gallant yet biting
comedy of satirical realism, in which, under the guise of telling the
story of a marriage contracted back in the 90's between a middle-aged
Southern aristocrat and the spoiled daughter of a rich contractor, he
strips the "old South after the war" of its last rag of chivalrous tradi-
tion and exposes it, a likable but ludicrous figure, to the cold light of
literalness.

The thing is done not only with amazing cleverness, but with fine
feeling. For to unmask so hallowed and huge a hypocrisy with such
absolute ruthlessness, yet to avoid in the doing even the appearance
of malice, is a triumph of the spirit as well as of technique. — J. B.
Kerfoot, in Life.

Certainly The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck is a most unusual book;

30 THE ART OF JAMES BRANCH CABELL

and one that does not yield up its significance upon a single reading.
That Mr. Cabell has elected to show love as a flame only, and never as a
star is to be regretted, but he has written a brilliant and powerful novel,
and he has written it with a sure touch, a keen insight, and a wealth of
suggestion, — N, Y, Times,

THE EAGLE'S SHADOW

(A Comedy of Purse-Strinffs)

It is quite true that Margaret H^ugonin descended into slang — ^after
having duly received permission. — and told one of her suitors to *'cut it
out." She went farther, she called another suitor "a tipsy old beast."
More dreadful yet, she swore, yes, swore both loud and deep. Swore
with a d — , a very big d — ; she said, "Damn you! damn you! God in
heaven damn you!"

A fine fierce mouthful of an oath, for a beauty, a belle, of the
chivalrous South! Yes, already I can hear the sniffs. Up rises the
noble army of the poor in humor, the rich in pomp and prejudice, the
barnacled with conventions, and announces that Margaret is no lady.
This is no prophecy I am going in for; it is an accomplished fact.

Purposely have I waited, so that the chorus of the shocked might rise
the mightier, that the uplifted hands and eyebrows might swell the more
in volume, and that, in fine, there might go up a more and more astound-
ing revelation of the sadly humorous side there is to this supposedly so
laughter-loving people of ours. I have heard more about "true woman-
liness,** about what "women of breeding*' do and do not do, and what is
considered fit for "decent society** than would fill a volume on moral
philosophy. And all because Margaret swore ! • . .

A pest upon these conscientious objectors! They lead one into almost
taking them seriously, and that were to commit their own folly. The
key to their folly is always to take seriously what was never meant so.

Margaret is not to be taken seriously. She is far too delightful. In
that delicious comedy is she not the most delicious figure? It is a long
time since we have had so lovable a heroine as Margaret. She is com-
pound, by her author, so deftly of all the fascinations and the futilities
that go to the making of the real feminine. To her author, James Branch
Cabell, one feels a debt of real gratitude. He has given us a real girl.

And how the serious Sunday school folks succeeded in finding this
charming young creature of flesh and blood "no lady*' — well, other flesh-
and-blood people must give up the dream of trying to guess that riddle.
. . . The objector, and the schoolmaster, and the referee as to what is
"ladylike" and what is not, are still abroad in the land, and we must
all of us, even be we so clever and merry as Mr. James Branch Cabell,
grin our best, and buck up, and bear it.

INDIVIDUAL COMMENT 31

Clever and merry : yes, the man who wrote The Eagle's Shadow is that,
and much more. He tells us quite frankly that he means only a comedy,
but there is fine irony in his comics, and there is true real understanding
of human nature. His picture of the house-party in the South, with a
young heiress surrounded by a blood-sucking company of persons all
after her money — philanthropists, lecturers, poets — ^is quite delightful
fooling. . . .

To detail the story of The Eagle's Shadow would be unfair to all
concerned. Hardly possible, moreover, since it were but re-sketching what
is already the most delicate, airiest of pencilings. But one cannot suf-
ficiently emphasize the charm of Margaret, or warmly enough welcome
her amid the ranks of those made to be loved and remembered, or too
heartily congratulate her author upon having told her story.

Margaret swore? She certainly did. Read the story and if after that
you do not say "Well, what of it?" you are fit for treasons, stratagems
and letters to the newspapers. — Percival Pollard, in the St Louis Mirror,

THE CREAM OF THE JEST

(A Comedy of Evasions)

1 say with profound conviction that you will obtain such joy out of
The Cream of the Jest as you have obtained out of the writings of no
modern author unless it be Anatole France or James Stephens. It is,
without question, the one book of the period in English most certain to
enjoy permanent favor with those to whom delicate whimsey, irony, an
intelligent point of view, nuance and subtleties of expression are the
highest desiderata in an author.

While the book makes some jesting pretence to the novel form, it
is not a novel at all. Ostensibly Mr. Cabell tells the story of a novelist
who finds life such a drab and aimless business that he takes refuge
from it and in fancy ranges the empyrean. Actually, it is a series of
essays containing the impressions of a sensitive, kindly and disillusioned
artist, ever intrigued by the eternal human tragi-comedy.

Mr. Cabell's literary creed is "to write perfectly of beautiful happen-
ings." Says he, "I quite fail to see why, in books or elsewhere, any
one should wish to be reminded of what human life is actually like. For
living is the one art in which mankind has never attained distinction."
Yet with this profession of romanticism, he writes with finer reality
than did Zola or does Dreiser with all their realism. He is selective
rather than photographic He omits the obvious details of factual re-
porting to treat realistically of human motives.

The productions of the modem realists, says he, have this in com-
mon with the best-sellers of the fiction counter: they make no demand
upon the reader's imagination, and they assume that the reader possesses

32 THE ART OF JAMES BRANCH CABELL

no particular information on any subject whatever. When, as a matter of
fact, the average man is woefully aware of the handicaps under which he
lives, has, at least secretly, a fair knowledge of his own shortcomings,
and is decently conscious that all is not entirely right with the world.

Furthermore, the average man like myself has some faint yearning for
an apperception and realization of beauty. He is, moreover, able to laugh
at his own foibles as well as at the foibles of others if they are not too
arrogantly pointed out. And to anyone who can suggest a way that he
may forget his petty troubles, short of alcohol and opiates, he is ex-
tremely grateful.

This Mr. Cabell does. He is a satirist whose chief object for satirical
thrusts is himself, the only satirist who really counts. He escapes every
illusion that he may the more easily embrace them all, kindly, knowingly,
resignedly. A chuckle now and then is the supreme anodyne, especially
if it is over one's own stupidity, littleness, and distressing humanness.
The apostle of revolt is the most thoroughly chained of slaves, a prisoner
indeed of his dreams: a moujik become a Bolshevik, abandoning a com-
placent poverty to be a penniless rattle-brain. But, essentially, dreams
count The idea is not to take them too seriously.

All these are platitudes, of course, but they are cullings from what
I take to be the point of view of a man who ambi-diverts upon that
point of view in the most exquisite language. Even Mr. Cabell's dialogue
is not the average speech of average persons, but it has the advantage of
being the speech he would infinitely prefer them to use. But if you
suppose from what I have said Mr. Cabell's characters are, like Mr.
Shaw's, mere mouth-pieces for the author's views you could not well
be more mistaken.

There is some seductive method, which minute analysis might yet ex-
plain, by which Mr. Cabell gives you a definite, four-dimensional portrait
of his characters. I suspect it is because he, better than most men who
write books, understands people and himself. — Burton Rascoe, in the
Chicago Tribune,

THE TOY- MAKER

From the dawn of the day to the dusk he toiled,
Shaping fanciful playthings with tireless hands, —
Useless trumpery toys; and, with vaulting heart,
Gave them unto all peoples — who mocked at him.
Trampled on them, and soiled them, and went their way.

Then he toiled from the morn to the dusk again.
Gave his gimcracks to people who mocked at him.
Trampled on them, deriding, and went their way.

Thus he labors, and loudly they jeer at him; —
That is, when they remember he still exists.

Who, you ask, f5 this fellow? — What matter names?
He is only a scribbler who is content.

NOV 2 4 1964